D is an incoming Freshman and taking a gap year. She has many friends at Stanford, Harvard and Yale doing the same. She only had to submit a plan for her year and it was approved within 24 hours. Harvard just recently announced they would be flexible with granting leave requests, but I think they had a flexible policy anyway. D also has friends at Vanderbilt who said leave requests were granted right up until plans for Fall were announced and then since then no gap years or deferrals of matriculation have been granted. I think schools are all over the place on that. But to OP’s question–a LOT of class of 2020 grads are heading into gap years from what we see.